The point is that it's not the XIX century anymore. Telecommunications and airplanes allow people to literally bypass the countryside and hop from city to city. Cheap transportation costs mean that markets are distributed and not as heavily reliant on local expansion as they were. Before, if an industrial business wanted to expand, doing it locally was the easiest and cheapest option; that's not true anymore, and in fact it's often counter-productive for some types of businesses (ones that can get critical mass online but not necessarily in their own country).

The only real barrier left, IMHO, is linguistic. English works in most cases but not all, and especially in some European regions there is still a heavy preference for localized languages.